White and clear wings in bats (Chiroptera)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
White or clear (“whitish”) wings are a distinct feature in about 30 species of tropical insectivorous bats (Mammalia: Chiroptera) belonging to three families (Emballonuridae, Molossidae, and Vespertilionidae). Such wings may provide camouflage against the sky at dusk and dawn, when bats commute to and from the roost and are vulnerable to aerial predation from birds. We tested this hypothesis by comparing the contrast of black, white, and transparent plastic models against the evening sky. Compared with normally dark wings, white and particularly transparent wings indeed reduce the contrast against the sky and may also prevent overheating in bats flying in daylight. Whitish wings could facilitate earlier evening emergence and later morning return, increasing access to crepuscular or diurnal insects as food. But whitish wings become maladaptive near artificial lights, where they are highly visible when illuminated against the dark sky. Pale but colored (not whitish) wings and reticulated patterns on translucent wings in some African and south Asian bats may be variations on the same theme, functional as camouflage against a lit background of vegetation and shades.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".